The Alexandria Assassin: The Strange Descent of Charles Severance
In December 2003, Nancy Dunning, wife of Alexandria, Virginia Sheriff James Dunning, was shot and killed after answering a knock at her front door, launching a cold case homicide investigation that would remain unsolved for over a decade. Ballistics, eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence eventually linked the murder to Charles Stanard Severance, a Virginia mechanical engineer and failed political candidate who was also convicted of murdering transportation planner Ronald Kirby in November 2013 and music teacher Ruthanne Lodato in February 2014, earning multiple capital murder convictions and consecutive life sentences.
Charles Severance was a Navy Admiral's son with a University of Virginia engineering degree who somewhere between a custody ruling and a decade of solitary drift rewrote his entire reality and started knocking on doors with a .22. He had a list, a manifesto, and a philosophy he called wisdom. Three people in one of America's most outwardly stable cities answered their doors on ordinary afternoons and never walked away from them. This is that story, and it is stranger than you are expecting it to be.
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